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Welcome to the artissimo.gr pages of News ! 
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English Language : Music Technology : News : Spring 2005 Friday 1 April 2005 : Revolutionary Physical Modelling Synthesizer built by Greek University : is this the end of all samplers ? |
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Information Athens, 1st of April 2005 The Department of Musical Acoustics of the University of Athens recently announced the favourable end of a giant project : a physical modelling synthesizer capable of simulating ALL existing physical instruments via the use of a large database of information concerning acoustic behaviour of all world's instruments. Many experts are now expecting colossal changes in the market of synthesizers and all their sub-products since the corresponding technology developed by the Greek University is going to be public domain and free for everybody to copy and take advantage of. But we have better listen to Dr. John Vlahopapadimitrakopoulos (vice chairman of the Department of Musical Acoustics) which is talking exclusively to artissimo.gr about the whole crucial subject :  - We are simply talking about the rapid demolition of the whole software market that has been developed around sound samples and the like. The project of the Department of Musical Acoustics, led one of the most prominent scientists on Acoustics one can find in Greece, Dr. Zahos TrypioFeggaropoulos, is built on the basis that all knowledge of how the actual sound is being generated by the very molecules of the underlying material can be modelled and taken advantage of by using contemporary algorithmic solutions of ultra-complex differential equations based on numerical analysis grounds. This way, by feeding the super-computer with the initial parameters, we have the computational output that describes how the sonic output is affected by the actual real-time parameters which can be sent to the computer at a real-time mode and listen to the real acoustic signal via a pair of single audio monitors. The CPU power necessary for eg. simulating an oboe instrument is roughly equivalent to 10% of the computational power of an Intel CPU approximately running at 3 GHz. One can now expect a lot of simple windows applications to be written easily within only weeks when the open-source community is given access to all the underlying papers, which of course will be soon a public domain property. At this point, we were eager to ask the following question : - This means that all technology concerning samplers and such things will be obsolete ? - Yes, I think major changes in the market of synthesizers and software programs are simply a matter of some months from now. - Thank you Professor for all your explanations. Everything is crystal clear. We have nothing but to watch what will happen from now on. The revolution has just begun ! (I hope is quite clear to you by now that all those are about ... April Fool's Day ! : artissimo.gr editor, Sunday 15 of May 2005) |
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